Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don't know how to teach yet. We don't particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.

This doesn't look as bad as it looks like it looks. Among younger mathematicians, I think it's reasonably well-known that the mathematical blogosphere is of surprisingly high quality and contains many insights that are not easily found in books (see, for example, Fields medalist Terence Tao's blog). So I would expect that younger mathematicians would not care so much about the difference between a good blog recommendation and a good book recommendation. I, for one, have been learning math from blog posts for years, but I might be an outlier in this regard.